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Perusing the jazz records at a vinyl outlet a few years ago, collector Kye Potter found a worn cassette by musician Jessica Williams. It seemed like the quintessential DIY release. "The labels had fallen off the tape," he recalls. "It was home-dubbed, with photocopied notes, a dab of fluorescent marker to emphasize the artwork, and issued on her own label, Ear Art."

As a collector particularly interested in the American musical avant garde following John Cage, Potter was captivated by a tape titled Prepared Piano. However, it felt atypical for Williams, who was primarily recognized for making vibrant jazz in the direct lineage of Thelonious Monk and Errol Garner.

If the West Coast scene knew her as a sonic explorer – at her live shows, she required pianos with the top removed to make it easier to reach inside and strum the strings – it was a facet that seldom found its way on her albums.

"It was my first time hearing anything like it," Potter remarks regarding the tape. Consequently, he contacted Williams to see if additional recordings had been made. She sent back four recordings of modified piano from the mid-80s – two live, two made in the studio. Although she had stepped away from public performance previously, she also enclosed some newer material. "She sent me around 15 or 16 electronic music cassettes – entire projects," Potter recounts.

A Legacy Release: Blue Abstraction

Potter partnered with Williams in the pandemic era to assemble Blue Abstraction, an album of modified piano compositions that was released in late 2025. Tragically, Williams passed away in 2022, during the project. She was seventy-three. "She was dealing with physical and economic challenges," Potter says. Williams had been open regarding her difficulties after spinal surgery in 2012, which ended her ability to tour, and a diagnosis of cancer in 2017. "Yet I feel her character, fortitude, assurance and the serenity she found through meditative practices all came out in conversation."

Within her more recent electronic, groove-focused releases such as Blood Music (2008) – boldly labeled "NOT JAZZ" – and the two Virtual Miles releases (2006 and 2007), you hear a musician trying to transcend tradition. Blue Abstraction, with its intriguingly altered piano resonances, reveals that that drive extended back decades. Instead of a homogenous piano sound, the piano creates numerous distinct sonic evocations: what could be hammered dulcimers, Indonesian percussion, far-off chimes, creatures in enclosures, and tiny engines sparking to life. It possesses a incredibly pressing energy, with monumental roars dissolving into growling, sharply accented riffs.

Critical Acclaim

Musician Jeff Parker says he is a fan of this "beautiful, varied, investigative and subtle" record. Vocalist Jessika Kenney, who has partnered with Sarah Davachi and Sunn O))), saw Williams play while being a student in Seattle in the 1990s, and was attracted to the intensity of her music, but was largely unaware of her dreamlike prepared piano prior to this release. Not long after attending Williams live, she traveled to Indonesia, in search of "surrealism in the improvisational vocals of the Javanese gamelan," she remembers. "Now that seems completely natural as a link with her. I only wish it was familiar to me then."

Artistic Forebears

Williams’ prepared sounds have technical precursors: reflect on John Cage’s altered keyboards, or the radical techniques of American eccentric Henry Cowell. The notable aspect is how successfully she blends these new sounds with her own soulful language at the keyboard. The stylistic approach hardly ever strays from that which she cultivated in a catalog spanning more than 80 albums, meaning the new trippily tinted sounds are fueled by the fizzy energy of an performer in full control. This is exhilarating material.

A Lifelong Experimenter

Williams consistently experimented with the piano. "I hit the notes, and I saw colours," she noted in an interview. She received her first vertical piano in 1954. On her blog, she shared the anecdote of her first "dismantling" – "as I’ve done for all pianos," she wrote: Williams detached a panel from under the piano’s keyboard, and set it on the floor alongside her stool. "I needed a drummer, and that left foot became the hi-hat foot," she wrote.

Initially, Williams learned classical piano at the Peabody Conservatory. Youthful exposures with the standard canon led her to Rachmaninov; she took his famous Prelude in C minor to her piano teacher, who scolded her for improvising a section. However, he detected her potential: the next week, he brought her Dave Brubeck to play. She mastered his Take Five within a week.

Frustration with the Scene

Subsequently, Brubeck describe Williams "a top-tier pianists I have ever heard," and McCoy Tyner was similarly impressed. Williams’ 2004 Grammy-nominated album Live at Yoshi’s, Vol 1, displays her deep absorption in jazz history, plus her characteristic whimsical pianistic wit. However, despite her dedicated efforts to learn about the genre – first, to the contemporary approaches of Coltrane, Miles and Dolphy, before tracing a path back to Monk and Garner to Fats Waller and James P Johnson – she rapidly felt disappointed with the jazz world.

Upon relocating from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Williams encountered the great Mary Lou Williams. Buoyed up by the senior musician's advice ("Don’t ever let anyone stop you"), she turned into a outspoken, vocal critic of her scene: of the low wages, the jazz "old boys' network," the "jazz hang" – namely smoking and drinking as the primary means of getting gigs – and of a commercial business benefiting from the efforts of financially strained musicians.

"I remain constantly disappointed at the reality of the ‘jazz world’ and its incapacity to organise, communicate and stand up for a set, any set, of core values," she stated in the liner notes to her 2008 release Deep Monk. Likewise, the writing on her blog was wide-ranging, honest, openly political and feminist, though she rarely discussed her experiences as a transgender woman. A commentator observed: "To add to the sexism … that chased her from her desired musical domain for a period, imagine what kind of cruel nonsense she must have suffered as a trans woman in the jazz scene of the early 80s."

Forging an Autonomous Career

Williams’ career arced towards self-sufficiency. After time in the vibrant Bay Area scene, she lived in smaller cities such as Sacramento and Santa Cruz, moving to Portland in 1991, and later relocating to an even quieter place, to Yakima, Washington State, in the 2010s. Williams saw early on the immense possibilities of the internet